Film Critic Matt Zoller Seitz: Success of Avengers, GOT shows cinema is officially dead

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"Avengers: Endgame" is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of "cinema" by "content."

The word refers to a piece of entertainment that can be delivered any number of ways, and that's defined less by its story, characters, source material, or presentational medium (cinema or TV) than by its brand identity (Marvel), its corporate parentage (Disney), and its ability to get hundreds of millions of people talking about it all at once, inducing such a state of excitement that they'll implicitly threaten harm against anyone who "spoils" the movie by discussing anything besides how much they loved it. (In one case, the threat was more than implicit: a Hong Kong moviegoer was beaten up outside a theater showing "Endgame" for loudly discussing plot details.) What we're seeing onscreen as we watch Captain America and Iron Man and the Hulk and Captain Marvel undo galactic genocide and destroy Thanos isn't merely a superhero battle for the ages, but a seismic cultural event. It marks the end of one era and the birth of another.

The "content" label has swarmed in, and continues to assimilate every art form. Increasingly, media outlets that used to distinguish the between the two have shown signs of surrendering to the inevitable. The founder of this site started running articles about TV in the final years of his life, and RogerEbert.com now has a thriving television section, and reviews two-hour movies made for streaming services like Netflix and other streaming platforms (of varying budget levels) alongside $250 million Disney tentpole pictures. My other regular outlet, New York Magazine (and its arts website Vulture), brokered a peace agreement between the film and TV sections, which were having miniature turf wars over who should review movies that went directly to TV and streaming platforms—as well as epic nonfiction projects like "O.J.: Made in America" that were financed as TV programs, but tried to game the system to get film awards by screening in their entirety in a handful of cinemas. Now the rule is that, with some exceptions, anything that's a stand-alone feature gets reviewed by the movie critics.

This will increasingly become the practice as theaters become largely event-driven spaces, pushing anything below a certain budget threshold to Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Vimeo, etc. In the future, media organizations might have to do away with the "film" and "TV" tags entirely, if indeed there are media organizations as we currently think of them.

This is what Steven Spielberg has really been beefing with Netflix about: the preservation of the theatrical experience, and of the idea of "cinema," and distinctions between art forms, in an age of "content" that streams along in the same digital river. Whether Spielberg's desire is even realistic is an open question. Based on my own experience chronicling both art forms, I'm increasingly convinced that film and TV started merging a long time ago, before most of us were aware of what was going on.

Most of the predictions that RogerEbert.com contributor Godfrey Cheshire wrote two decades ago in his landmark essays "The Death of Film" and "The Decay of Cinema" have come to pass, though not in exactly the manner he predicted. But a big one is the idea that "movies after the 20th century will have neither the esthetic singularity nor the cultural centrality that they presently enjoy."

Notwithstanding the occasional outlier, such as the theatrical version of Stephen King's "It" and Jordan Peele's first two movies, television series, and streaming, serialized entertainment generally, have been at the center of cultural conversation for at least ten years, perhaps longer. The only movies that have rivaled the biggest TV series as mass-culture events are ones that have certain obvious, TV-like properties, and exploit them brilliantly. The big ones are the MCU and DCEU films, the Disney-era "Star Wars" films, and to a lesser extent, the 21st century kaiju extravaganzas kicked off by the 2013 "Godzilla." ("King Kong Skull Island" and "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" followed, and the entire franchise is building towards "King Kong vs. Godzilla," the kaiju answer to Thanos vs. The Avengers.)

Whether what's truly being aped here is television, the theatrical cliffhangers of the 1940s and '50s, the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens and other 19th century magazine writers, or comic books and comic strips is ultimately a distinction without a difference. They're all manifestations of the same commercial/artistic impulse, to keep audiences on the hook, constantly craving dopamine rush that comes with narrative closure, even when it proves to be temporary, just a setup for the next cliffhanger. The takeaway here should be that television and cinema have merged into the endless, insatiable content stream, and the biggest, baddest examples of image-driven entertainment—the works that have the power to unite large sections of an otherwise fragmented society—are the ones that are more reminiscent of television as we've always known it.

These make a much stronger impression on the public than cinema comprised of feature films that are approximately 90 minutes to three hours long, that have their own freestanding narrative and stylistic integrity, and that are meant to be contemplated as freestanding objects, even when (as in the case of, say, the "Godfather" or "Alien" movies) they are part of an ongoing series. Those kinds of entertainments now seem like a blip in the continuum.

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